Last month we received an email from Marquetta Harrison, from Kansas City, Missouri, wanting to tell her story. In July of 2010, her son Corey Webb, then age 16, was charged with aggravated assault against a public servant—a crime for which he was sentenced to 50 years. In emails with Marquetta, it is clear that her story reveals a state and a system that holds punishment by incarceration in the highest order.
 

 
To give you an idea of the criminal system in Texas, here are some statistics accumulated by Robert Perkinson, a Soros Justice Fellowship recipient and author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire:
 

-       Minimum number of Texas residents under criminal justice supervision: 740,905

-       Total prison population (both violent and non) of the U.K., the most incarcerated country in Europe: 82,241

-       Estimated percent chance in 1996 that a … Read More »